In the Levant / Twenty Fifth Impression

by Charles Dudley Warner

Smyrna can be compared to Damascus in its age and in its perpetuity under all discouragements and changes,—the shocks of earthquakes, the constant visitations of pestilence, and the rule of a hundred masters. It was a great city before the migration of the Ionians into Asia Minor, it saw the rise and fall of Sardis, it was restored from a paralysis of four centuries by Alexander. Under all vicissitudes it seems to have retained its character of a great mart of exchange, a necessity for the trade of Asia; and perhaps the indifference of its conglomerate inhabitants to freedom and to creeds contributed to its safety. Certainly it thrived as well under the Christians, when it was the seat of one of the seven churches, as it did under the Romans, when it was a seat of a great school of sophists and rhetoricians, and it is equally prosperous under the sway of the successor of Mohammed. During the thousand years of the always decaying Byzantine Empire it had its share of misfortunes, and its walls alternately, at a later day, displayed the star and crescent, and the equal arms of the cross of St. John. Yet, in all its history, I seem to see the trading, gay, free, but not disorderly Smyrna passing on its even way of traffic and of pleasure.

Of its two hundred thousand and more inhabitants, about ninety thousand are Rayah Greeks, and about eighty thousand are Turks. There is a changing population of perhaps a thousand Europeans, there are large bodies of Jews and Armenians, and it was recently estimated to have as many as fifteen thousand Levantines. These latter are the descendants of the marriage of Europeans with Greek and Jewish women; and whatever moral reputation the Levantines enjoy in the Levant, the women of this mixture are famous for their beauty. But the race is said to be not self-sustaining, and is yielding to the original types. The languages spoken in Smyrna are Turkish, a Greek dialect (the Romaic), Spanish, Italian, Trench, English, and Arabic, probably prevailing in the order named. Our own steamer was much more Oriental than the city of Smyrna. As soon as we stepped ashore we seemed to have come into a European city; the people almost all wear the Frank dress, the shops offer little that is peculiar. One who was unfamiliar with bazaars might wonder at the tangle of various lanes, but we saw nothing calling for comment. A walk through the Jewish quarter, here as everywhere else the dirtiest and most picturesque in the city, will reward the philosophic traveller with the sight of lovely women lolling at every window. It is not the fashion for Smyrniote ladies to promenade the streets, but they mercifully array themselves in full toilet and stand in their doorways.

The programme of the voyage of the Achille promised us a day and a half in Smyrna, which would give us time to visit Ephesus. We were due Friday noon; we did not arrive till Saturday noon. This vexatious delay had caused much agitation on board; to be cheated out of Ephesus was an outrage which the tourists could not submit to; they had come this way on purpose to see Ephesus. They would rather give up anything else in the East. The captain said he had no discretion, he must sail at 4 p. M. The passengers then prepared a handsome petition to the agent, begging him to detain the steamer till eight o'clock, in order to permit them to visit Ephesus by a special train. There is a proclivity in all those who can write to sign any and every thing except a subscription paper, and this petition received fifty-six eager and first-class signatures. The agent at Smyrna plumply refused our request, with unnecessary surliness; but upon the arrival of the captain, and a consultation which no doubt had more reference to freight than to the petition, the official agreed, as a special favor, to detain the steamer till eight o'clock, but not a moment longer.

We hastened to the station of the Aidin Railway, which runs eighty miles to Aidin, the ancient Tralles, a rich Lydian metropolis of immemorial foundation. The modern town has perhaps fifty thousand inhabitants, and is a depot for cotton and figs; that sweetmeat of Paradise, the halva, is manufactured there, and its great tanneries produce fine yellow Morocco leather. The town lies only three miles from the famous tortuous Mæander, and all the region about it is a garden of vines and fruit-trees. The railway company is under English management, which signifies promptness, and the special train was ready in ten minutes; when lo! of the fifty-six devotees of Ephesus only eleven appeared. We were off at once; good engine, solid track, clean, elegant, comfortable carnages. As we moved out of the city the air was full of the odor of orange-blossoms; we crossed the Meles, and sped down a valley, very fertile, smiling with grain-fields, green meadows, groves of midberry, oranges, figs, with blue hills,—an ancient Mount Olympus, beyond which lay green Sardis, in the distance, a country as lovely and home-like as an English or American farm-land. We had seen nothing so luxuriant and thriving in the East before. The hills, indeed, were stripped of trees, but clad on the tops with verdure, the result of plentiful rains.

We went “express.” The usual time of trains is three hours; we ran over the fifty miles in an hour and a quarter. We could hardly believe our senses, that we were in a luxurious carriage, flying along at this rate in Asia, and going to Ephesus! While we were confessing that the lazy swing of the carriage was more agreeable than that of the donkey or the dromedary, the train pulled up at station Ayasolook, once the residence of the Sultans of Ayasolook, and the camp of Tamerlane, now a cluster of coffeehouses and railway-offices, with a few fever-stricken inhabitants, who prey upon travellers, not with Oriental courtesy, but with European insolence.

On our right was a round hill surmounted by a Roman castle; from the hills on the left, striding across the railway towards Ephesus, were the tall stone pillars of a Roman aqueduct, the brick arches and conductor nearly all fallen away. On the summit of nearly every pillar a white, red-legged stork had built, from sticks and grass, a high round nest, which covered the top; and the bird stood in it motionless, a beautiful object at that height against the sky.

The station people had not obeyed our telegram to furnish enough horses, and those of us who were obliged to walk congratulated ourselves on the mistake, since the way was as rough as the steeds. The path led over a ground full of stone débris. This was the site of Ayasolook, which had been built out of the ruins of the old city; most picturesque objects were the small mosque-tombs and minarets, which revived here the most graceful forms and fancies of Saracenic art. One, I noticed, which had the ideal Persian arch and slender columns, Nature herself had taken into loving care and draped with clinging green and hanging vines. There were towers of brick, to which age has given a rich tone, flaring at the top in a curve that fascinated the eye. On each tomb, tower, and minaret the storks had nested, and upon each stood the mother looking down upon her brood. About the crumbling sides of a tower, thus draped and crowned, innumerable swallows had built their nests, so that it was alive with birds, whose cheerful occupation gave a kind of pathos to the human desertion and decay.

Behind the Roman castle stands the great but ruinous mosque of Sultan Selim, which was formerly the Church of St. John. We did not turn aside for its empty glory, but to the theologian or the student of the formation of Christian dogmas, and of the gladiatorial spectacles of an ancient convocation, there are few arenas in the East more interesting than this; for in this church it is supposed were held the two councils of a. d. 431 and 449. St. John, after his release from Patmos, passed the remainder of his life here; the Virgin Mary followed him to the city, so favored by the presence of the first apostles, and here she died and was buried. From her entombment, Ephesus for a long time enjoyed the reputation of the City of the Virgin, until that honor was transferred to Jerusalem, where, however, her empty tomb soon necessitated her resurrection and assumption,—the subject which inspired so many artists after the revival of learning in Europe. In the hill near this church Mary Magdalene was buried; in Ephesus also reposed the body of St. Timothy, its first bishop.

This church of St. John was at some distance from the heart of the city, which lay in the plain to the south and near the sea, but in the fifth century Ephesus was a city of churches. The reader needs to remember that in that century the Christian controversy had passed from the nature of the Trinity to the incarnation, and that the first council of Ephesus was called by the emperor Theodosius in the hope of establishing the opinion of the Syrian Nestorius, the primate of Constantinople, who refused to give to the mother of Christ the title, then come into use, of the Mother of God, and discriminated nicely the two natures of the Saviour. His views were anathematized by Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria, and the dispute involved the entire East in a fierce contest. In the council convened of Greek bishops, Nestorius had no doubt but he would be sustained by the weight of authority; but the prompt Cyril, whose qualities would have found a conspicuous and useful theatre at the head of a Roman army against the Scythians, was first on the ground, with an abundance of spiritual and temporal arms. In reading of this council, one recalls without effort the once famous and now historical conventions of the Democratic party of the State of New York, in the days when political salvation, offered in the creeds of the “Hard Shells” and of the “Soft Shells,” was enforced by the attendance of gangs of “Short boys” and “Tammany boys,” who understood the use of slung-shot against heretical opinions. It is true that Nestorius had in reserve behind his prelates the stout slaves of the bath of Zeuxippus, but Cyril had secured the alliance of the bishop of Ephesus, and the support of the rabble of peasants and slaves who were easily excited to jealousy for the honor of the Virgin of their city; and he landed from Egypt, with his great retinue of bishops, a band of merciless monks of the Nile, of fanatics, mariners, and slaves, who took a ready interest in the theological discussions of those days. The council met in this church, surrounded by the fierce if not martial array of Cyril; deliberations were begun before the arrival of the most weighty supporters of Nestorius,—for Cyril anticipated the slow approach of John of Antioch and his bishops,—and in one day the primate of Constantinople was hastily deposed and cursed, together with his heresy. Upon the arrival of John, he also formed a council, which deposed and cursed the opposite party and heresy, and for three months Ephesus was a scene of clamor and bloodshed. The cathedral was garrisoned, the churches were shut against the Nestorians; the imperial troops assaulted them and were repelled; the whole city was thrown into a turmoil by the encounters of the rival factions, each council hurled its anathemas at the other, and peace was only restored by the dissolution of the council by command of the emperor. The second session, in the year 449, was shorter and more decisive; it made quick work of the heresy of Nestorius. Africa added to its delegation of bullies and fanatics a band of archers; the heresy of the two natures was condemned and anathematized,—

“May those who divide Christ be divided with the sword, may they be hewn in pieces, may they be burned alive,”—and the scene in the cathedral ended in a mob of monks and soldiers, who trampled upon Flavian, the then primate of Constantinople, so that in three days thereafter he died of his wounds.